


his shattered soul

by carloabay



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes's Plums, Irish Steve Rogers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24649561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carloabay/pseuds/carloabay
Summary: Bucky wishes after plums and Steve in Bucharest.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	his shattered soul

**Author's Note:**

> Re-written. Apologies.

The apartment in Bucharest is cold all the time, and there are water stains on the ceiling. I drag a mattress from a dump in an alley up ten flights of stairs and manhandle it through the door. It _flumps_ sadly onto the planks and bounces once, and I take a second to recover; everything makes me lose breath now. 

The apartment isn't mine. I didn't buy it. It was an empty room on an empty floor, so I slept on the floor one night, and the next, and the next. Then, on the fourth night, I woke with a warm, bony weight draped over my hip, and a flash of a memory scored my eyes: a single bed, a cold room, and a light, thin boy curled into my side. I stayed still as long as I dared, and when I lifted my head, a brown cat blinked sleepily at me with eyes far too large for its tiny face.

I shove the mattress into the corner of the room and throw my blankets on top of it. Almost immediately, the cat drops down from the mouldy window sill and settles himself into the pile of blankets, eyes slitting with comfortable pleasure.

"You're welcome," I say, grabbing the notebook on top of the fridge. I have to write down everything important the moment it comes to me, or it drifts away in the mess of my thoughts. There are scribbled things to do in the notebook, all out of order.  
_  
A knife_

_Food  
Coat for rain_

_Clock  
Water  
_  
It's in German, for some reason. I don't remember learning German, but the instant I woke up this morning, my muddled thoughts were all in German and my temples felt like they were being crushed, imploding my head. The episode ended with me throwing up out of the window, onto someone's balcony far below, the cat sprawled lazily across the floor, watching me. When I pulled my head in, shivering, the cat licked his lips and yawned, and I coughed and snarled at it. 

"Easy enough for you, isn't it," I'd snapped. He had just stared at me reproachfully until I'd gone into the mouldy bathroom to wash my mouth out.

I stare for a while at the scribbles, then tuck my metal hand into a glove and into my pocket, put my hat on my head, low over my eyes, and leave the apartment. I have emergency bags all over Bucharest now, and one is hanging in the broken elevator shaft, behind the doors on the seventh floor, this floor, the only ones that won't open with the button. No one lives on the seventh floor. No one cleans it, either. I stick my metal fingers into the gap between the doors and twist, and the doors slide apart with an unholy screech.

_"Subtle, Barnes."_

_"Shut it, Falsworth. It was the best I could do with Captain Obvious's goddamn red white and blue shield."_

_"Captain Obvious, your commanding officer."_

_"Have some respect, Barnes."_

_"Sir, yes sir. I'd like to surrender myself for disciplinary action."_

_Someone sniggers, and I get a cuff up the head._

_"Shut the hell up, all of you!"_

I reach through the elevator doors and snag the bag: I've found that it's easier to pickpocket money than shoplift, so the bag is full of other people's wallets. I saw an advertisement the other day, about street thieves; it warned people about them. I suppose stealing's bad. But did the law ever think of brainwashed Nazi assassins just trying to get by? 

I take the stairs to ground level, avoiding eye contact, always avoiding eye contact. It was a habit I had, probably from before I stumbled from the bank of the Potomac covered in debris and mud, so I have to assume that Hydra didn't like it when their weapons made any sort of humanly communicational gestures, and I had that habit beaten into me.

I turn right once I'm outside, stumping heavily down the pavement. The Russians never taught me to be silent and light, like the Red girls, and Hydra never cared. They taught me to be cruel and brutal, never silent. Stealth, not subtlety. 

I know the route to the market without having to raise my head; the first time I tried to find my way, every touch of the open air on my face felt like a camera flash, a documentation. There was a reason for the mask on missions, in Washington, Long Island, Kampala, Shenzhen. Stealth, not subtlety.

I wait at the traffic lights. There's a lady with two toddlers, both children red-faced and squalling. She bends down to reprimand them, and I shift a foot away. She can't look up and see me, even if she may not recognise me. No one can see me.

I find a clothes shop called Opshop: there's a heavy ventilation box hung beside the window, and the light from inside is a warm orange. The doors are frosted glass panes covered in curly iron. Dirty white walls and large windows. 

The air outside is heavy and damp, but Opshop has a cool, calm atmosphere and a smell of second-hand wool. It's very Romanian, yet all the signs are in English: 

_Unlucky? Try upstairs._

_Vintage and second-hand._

_Real leather!_

Shoes and bags and sweaters and shirts, bundled together in colorful array. The man at the till is very old and smiling toothlessly as I dump a crumpled coat with a fluffy inlay and a large hood on the counter. He rings it up and looks me up and down. I fix my stare on his bony fingers, and he says in Romanian, "A hundred and twenty Lei."

A hundred and twenty lei?

"It says two hundred and fifty," I reply, pointing to the price tag with my right hand. My left hand is securely in my pocket.

"Half price," he lisps. I don't even dare to look up as I argue.

"Don't see a sign."

"How much money you got?"

"Enough." I dig in the bag for money, and come up with three hundred lei; I never steal cards: I don't know how to use them. But I need more than that for the rest of my shopping. The old man taps the counter twice with a claw-like hand.

"Store is half off for people who've been through it," he croaks. I don't move my head.

"I haven't-"

"Hundred and twenty, or no coat," he says, challenging. I concede, and throw the money in ten Lei notes across the counter at him, take the coat, and scram. I don't have the freedom to thank his kindness.

_Scram._

English word. Very American. Very James Barnes.

I shove the coat into my bag unceremoniously once I'm outside and take a damp breath from the damp air. It threatens rain. That's probably why I thought I needed the coat.

I think: two ends, fixed together. I think: to make ends meet.

I want plums. Plums and chocolate and ham. I like eating whatever I find. Bucharest is full of food, and Romanian food is a blend of a lot of Eastern European cuisine: _sarmale_ and _tocanita_ and _Muschi poiana_ , mostly vegetables and spiced meats and salt, and it beats Hydra's puréed nutrition tubes any day.

The market is close: I can smell the street food and hear the yells of the stall runners. I cross a street and turn two corners and then across the busy road from me, the fruit man calls his prices out at passers-by. I look left and right, and the growl of a motorbike builds and builds until it roars past me. It leaves a feeling like a shot of ice down my neck, and I try to shake myself free. Motorbikes will go on my list of warnings, now. The next page in my notebook. I will write: _Motorbikes: ice._

I cross the road to the fruit stand and look over all the fresh produce from under my cap. Bright smudges of colour in a dim day. Bananas, apples, plums, peaches. Peaches? It's not peach season. It's April. I don't know how I know that. I don't like it. It makes me think of wire cords and palm trees and strangulation. I stop thinking about the peaches. I leave the fruit stand altogether. I'll buy the plums tomorrow. 

There's a woman selling kitchenware four stalls down, wooden ladles with pretty patterns carved into them, polished bowls, knives with intricate bone handles. It looks very expensive. She's also selling art supplies, handcrafted things, paintbrush sets wrapped in leather cases, handmade canvases.

I think: he'd like them, for his birthday. Whose birthday? I think: he can never have enough paints. 

There's a scooping sensation in my stomach. Like someone dug a hole.

_"I'm going to dig a hole to China!"_

_"Silly! You can't get to China from here! Everyone knows you'll just hit the sea!"_

_"Well, I'll dig under it, then."_

_..._

_"She wants to be an archanologinx, ma!"_

_"Archaeologist, baby."_

_"Archanologinx," I mutter, brushing sand off my sleeves.  
_

A hole like loss. Paints. Canvases. I think of the other notebooks in the apartment. The one that smells like wood, the one that the cat likes to sit on, all full of drawings and watercolour and splashes of memory. 

_Steve._

Whose birthday?

_He's curled on his chair in a position that can't be good for his spine. I hang back in the doorway. He's already sketched out the frame of the window and a vague impression of the buildings outside it; I know what's next, I've seen him do it a million times before. He'll curl his thin fingers just so around the pencil, and outline. Make it all bolder and better and outstanding, before he starts the colour, then the detail. He's making a frame, a scaffolding. A skeleton._

_The window is open, blowing dirty Brooklyn air in, fluttering his huge shirt around him. Sometimes the wind sucks out, and for a second, the bones of his curved spine stick out in sharp relief. He'll get cold, soon. But for now, he'll crouch on the chair in front of the city skyline, more cat than boy. Thin bones. Warm weight. And I am little more than the fluttering breeze, a ghost, a skeleton of my own memory._

The cat's birthday? _Steve._ Steve's birthday. Steven Grant Rogers, fourth of July. He can never have enough paints.

I am still standing in front of the kitchenware and art supplies stand. It's an odd combination of wares, I realise. Forks and plates alongside charcoal pencils. The reel of memories has left me shivering and blinking, and the woman in the stand is staring suspiciously. My head is too messy. I scratch my chin, and my fingernails catch in stubble. Damp from the air. Keep walking. The woman is watching. 

I end up in a grocery store. The market...not today. Not today. But the strip of fluorescent light down the freezer aisle has me grinding my teeth down on the teeth shield. It isn't there, and bone hits bone, and the cold air and harsh light pushes me cruelly back to the white-out chair. My temples throb. My left hand curls and clinks in my pocket. The milk and yoghurt swims behind my eyes, turning to lab coats and automatic weapons, and it's too cold, the sweat on my bare chest cooling there, rising goosebumps. I stumble to the back of the store, blinded by the light and the absence of restraints, and I hit my hip on a counter.

"Esti bine, amice?" The cold is gone. The smell of bread...doesn't belong in the laboratory. Doesn't fit with the white-out chair. They didn't speak Romanian in Siberia. They didn't speak Romanian in Washington. I un-clench my jaw.

"Da," I manage. I pull my collar up further, try to stop from shivering. If I'm cold...there's a coat in my bag. I'm not cold. I'm fine. Bread. There's a pastry section of the store, and the man running it leans his elbows on the counter. He has tattoos cloaking his neck and flour on the bridge of his strong, straight nose. I look away from him. I look at the pastries behind the glass counter, away from him. He looks at me. Gogoși. Never heard of it. No memories. I tap the glass, because there's saliva filling my mouth and coating my tongue and I don't trust myself to use my voice again.

"Câte?" he asks, reaching for a paper bag.

 _"How many should we get, Buck?" He's giddy with excitement, eyes round. I could replace his eyeballs with sugared pastries and not know the difference right now. I laugh._

Do I laugh? The memory makes no sound. A laugh. 

_"Ten," I say with a wide grin. "Five each, huh?"_

I hold up all the fingers on my right hand. Five for me. None for him, whoever he was. _Steve._

The pastry guy nods and starts to fill the bag. One, two, three...I lose count. I'm thinking of a boy with sugared pastries for eyeballs. 

It's 13.55 Lei. I come up with two ten banknotes and hand them over. He exchanges them for the pastries with a smile and some coins. I take the pastries and the coins. I don't return the smile. He's still looking, even as I walk away, as I look away.

I buy some ham in a plastic packet. Limp on its foam tray, gathering condensation. I find a hardware store, after ten minutes of stalking the pavements with the ache of the white-out chair twinging in my temples. I haven't had the bruises for months, years? but I have them still, somehow.

They sell kitchen knives. Flimsy and blunt. I buy two, because they come in packets of two, and the seller doesn't ask for ID. Why packets of two? Would you sell a chair in a pack of two? My thoughts are absurd. My head is messy.

I back into a small avenue full of garbage and dump my bag, then I squat in the muck and rip the knife packet open with my teeth and one hand. I accidentally fall onto my bag, and I'm out of breath, again, suddenly. My left hand is still inside my pocket and I don't take it out, and I don't stop myself from falling. The pastries make a faint paper crinkle from inside as I land on them, and the knives clatter onto the floor. I pick one knife up, and it goes in the bag. I pick the other one up, and it slides into the waistband of my trousers. The hems of my shirt and my sweater tuck over the handle, and the thin metal rests, chilled, against my underwear. Not a good place to put a knife. I leave it there and climb to my feet and pick up my bag and start to walk again.

A clock. I wanted a clock. Why? Did I want to keep time? Did I want to keep time so that I would _stay_ in time? So that I would be able to tell if I woke up out of time, minus an arm, in the cold. So that I would know the exact time I killed that man in Johannesburg. So that I would know the exact time I succeeded in teaching a little girl how to snap a man's neck.

I wanted a clock to keep time, to wake up in the morning, to go to sleep before dark, to know how many hours since I last ate.

I stop walking. Clocks. Ticking at me. Moustached faces, peering through a glass cage. 

"Hello," I say. Someone giggles nearby, and I turn. A little girl in a huge coat gazes up at me, under the cap, a little smile on her face. She walks on, dragged by her father. I stay very still. Did she see me? Did she laugh at the moustached faces, or at me? If I were a little girl, I'd laugh at the moustached faces. If I could laugh.

_"Give him a drink. Go on."_

_"Why? They said it doesn't get him drunk."_

_"Go on. For fun." They start to egg him on and he shrugs, and picks up the bottle. He hands it to the soldier. The soldier looks at it. The soldier looks at him._

_"Just vodka. Go on." The soldier does nothing, and he wiggles the bottle._

_"Drink!" someone yells, and someone giggles nearby. The soldier takes the bottle. The soldier drinks. The others erupt into roars of laughter and someone kicks the table, scattering cards everywhere. The soldier hands back the bottle. They keep laughing._

I open the door to the shop and go straight to the counter. I've never bought a clock before.

"Hello," I say in Romanian. The cashier, a woman with a shaved head, smiles at me.

"How can I help you?"

"I'd like to buy a clock."

"You've come to the right place." There's a plastic clock, ticking away in time with the others, on a display shelf to my left. I dig my left hand further into my pocket. The plastic clock is hidden behind a glass faced one and one with a wooden frame in the shape of an animal. With scales. Alligator? Dragon. I reach for the plastic one and put it on the counter. Plastic is good enough for me.

By the time I've gotten back to the apartment, put the bag back in the elevator and dumped my findings on the creaking floor by the mattress, the cat has moved. The chink of sunlight he had been sitting in is now over by the door leading onto the broken balcony, and he is stretched out on the floor, drunk on the golden light. I set the clock by the mattress and straighten out the blankets, but the cat only acknowledges me when I open the bag of pastries. We spend the rest of the daylight hours sitting on the floor, eating pastries and ham and thinking about laughter. The cat likes the ham. The cat likes to rest his head on my knee and chew ham with his claws pricking my blankets.

I fall asleep on the mattress and sleep without dreaming for two hours, until I wake up and see the clock, moustachioed, ticking sternly at me. Two hours. I smile at the clock. My mouth tastes like old sugar and bad breath, and I go to the bathroom. I drink a palmful of rusty water. I forgot to get water. It was in my notebook. I drink another palmful and hope it doesn't make me sick, and then I stand in front of the door to the broken balcony and stare through the little window at Bucharest in the night. It glitters. Some cities glow, like Tokyo and New York and Portsmouth. Bucharest is like stars, or the moonbeams seen on the sea from the house in La Ciotat.

_"Hey, Buck. Can't sleep?"_

_"It's a problem. Now I know how you feel."_

_"Bed too soft?"_

_"Yeah, I guess. 'm used to the ground. What are you doing up?"_

_"Moon was too bright." He misses the articles out. I already know he does that. I've known it for years._

_"You should paint it."_

_"Somehow, I think I'd be hard pressed to find paints in this house." A statement, with a sigh of a laugh._

_"Eh, we could sneak into town. You can never resist paints, can ya?"_

_"You know we're on mission, right?"_

_"Sir, yessir!" I snap out a mock salute and he chuckles. His laugh used to be like an engine starting. It used to cause me so much anxiety. I tell him so and he grins._

_"I reckon just about everything I did caused you anxiety."_

_"You're a handful," I tease, and when he laughs, I laugh with him._

The house in La Ciotat. I think: Steve's laugh. And my laugh. I think: me, laughing. At the Smithsonian. A silent video. James Buchanan Barnes, immortalised behind glass and electricity. I walk back to the mattress and pull the blankets over my shoulders and I lie down and, once again, I sleep without dreaming. The cat is warm and bony. Just like...the weight of a warm and bony boy.

I go back to the market the next day. I go straight for the fruit stall and I don't look at the peaches, but I pull my left arm out of my pocket, glove and all, and reach for a plum. It's the perfect ripeness.

_Plum juice splashes onto the ground beside my trousers and I jerk away, trying to eat it over the dust instead of over my clean clothes. Steve lies on his stomach in the heat, covered head to toe in his patched-up linen, and weaves the world together in his sketchbook. No space for sunburn. I spit out the plum skin and the archeologist whacks my shoulder. Blue juice, staining my fingernails._

_"Disgusting," she says. I leer at her, showing my dyed teeth, and she pushes me into the dust. The sun glares down on Steve's back and I lick my lips and hop up, reaching into the tree for another plum. Me and the archeologist are sitting in the shade, but Steve refused. He likes the heat. I toss one to him and it splatters on the ground in front of his sketchbook, spraying droplets of juice onto his drawing. His sharp little face gets bitter and he tries to blot it off._

_"Sorry," I say, not sorry at all. He's been being grumpy all day. His shoulder blades rise and rattle with a sigh, and the archeologist kicks my ankles. My trousers are getting too short. Ma insisted I didn't need new ones. I believed her, and look where we are._

_"Eejit," the archeologist says._

_"You got plum on your dress, Siobhan," I say, by way of retaliation. She gasps, then growls when she sees that I lied._

_"Bucky?" I look around, and Rebecca appears from the other side of the plum tree. "Bucky?"_

_"Yeah, Becca," I call back. Steve dabs carefully at his sketchbook. Siobhan bites into another plum and sighs at the sun, letting her eyes fall closed._

_"Ma says ya needa come in."_

_"Why?"_

_"Too hot," she says, and she grabs herself a plum and settles herself primly into the dust._

_"I think we're doin' just fine out," I say. She shrugs and slurps at her plum, and Steve presses pencil to paper and Siobhan suns herself with her fruit and I sit back with my too short trousers and my friends and my sister and my plums._

"How are they? Are they good?" I ask the seller in Romanian.

"Yes. Fresh, very fresh," he says, hands clasped behind his back.

"Give me six, thank you," I say. He puts them in a bag for me and I pay and as I walk away, they jostle my palm, like each one wants to be eaten first. My thoughts are absurd. But I can't wait to eat them.

I look left and right. No motorbikes. No ice. I look up across the road, and a man in a cap from a small stall selling postcards pulls a lollipop from his mouth. He stares. He stares. I shouldn't have looked up, I shouldn't- he reaches for something, a phone, a radio, he says something, and as I walk forward he rushes away, leaving the stall unattended. I reach the counter. My heart is rabbiting. Silly word. A newspaper, spread out on the counter, proclaims of a bombing in Vienna. I grab it with one hand and study it and it shouts at me, big block letters, _Winter Soldier cautat pentru Bombardmentul din Viena._ I stare around. The man is gone. I can't run. I have to walk, nonchalant, subtle. Back to the apartment. The bag, beneath the floorboards. Then I can run.

There's someone in the apartment, and it isn't the cat. Large. Broad shoulders. Holding my notebook. Someone buzzes through a radio in his ear and he answers it. I stay in the doorway.

_Steve._

He- 

He knows. He turns. He sees me. I see him. He sets down the notebook.

"Do you know who I am?" he asks. Not an asthmatic rattle. Not a joke or a tease.

"You're Steve," I say. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Steve and Bucky. In their glass cages. Steven Grant Rogers and James Buchanan Barnes. "I read about you in a museum." It's not a hard lie. Buzz, buzz, in Steve's ear. Getting louder. You can almost make out the words.

"I know you're nervous," he says. "And you have plenty of reason to be." The knife from yesterday still tickles my thigh. "But you're lying." I have to leave. I have to run. I'm out of breath. His eyes are very blue. I'm out of time.

"I wasn't in Vienna," I say. The bag is under the planks, across the room, behind Steve. "I don't do that anymore." I need him to believe me, if no one else will. Steve always believed me, to a fault.

" **They're entering the building,** " buzzes Steve's radio.

"Well the people who think you did are coming here now," Steve says urgently. "And they're not planning on taking you alive." Why should they?

"That's smart," I say. "Good strategy." I'd do the same, if I were them. Maybe the world is better off without my broken memories and messy head and wanting for Steve. Maybe, if they don't take me alive, the shattered man will go free. For the first and final time.

" **They're on the roof, I'm compromised!** "

Running, heavy footsteps, up the stairs. The elevator is broken. Why would an armed response team take the elevator? My thoughts are absurd.

Steve looks at me, _Looks_ at me.

"This doesn't have to end in a fight, Buck," he says. Like he's pleading.

_Buck. Buck._

But it does. It will. It has to.

The armed team has stopped running. They're here. For me. Time to run. Out of time.

"It always ends in a fight," I say.

" **Five seconds!** " Steve's sharp frown appears. I remember that. I remember him. Did Siobhan Walsh ever become an archeologist? I want to ask. Steve might know. I never found out. My thoughts are absurd.

"You pulled me from the river," Steve says urgently. "Why?" I don't know.

_"That man on the bridge. Who was he?"_

I don't know. 

_"But I knew him."_

I knew him.

"I don't know," I say. I don't know.

"Yes, you do." His eyes, so blue. Sea jewels. They were always blue. Sky diamonds. I don't know. I knew him. Maybe that's how.

**"Breach! Breach! Breach!"**


End file.
